Various forms of clamps are known for holding together the sides of flexible bags to thereby close the bag. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,629,905 to Cote describes a device which is adapted to clamp the opposed sides of a bag adjacent its mouth together along their length. The device includes two opposed elongate members which form jaws adapted to move towards and away from each other and to clamp the opposite walls of a bag therebetween adjacent the mouth of the bag to thereby close the bag. The device needs to be relatively large so that the elongate members can accommodate the full width of the mouth of the bag and therefore is undesirably large for many applications.
Another example is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,428,098 to Coker and Coker which describes a device which is also adapted to clamp together the opposed sides of a bag adjacent its mouth across the full width of the mouth. While the device may seal the bag effectively it also needs to be relatively large.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,546,637 to Niedecker describes a plastic clip which functions differently from the two previously mentioned devices in that it is intended to clamp a sausage casing or bag in which the walls thereof have been gathered to form a tip. However, the Niedecker device has two separate parts which must be fitted to the bag tip and interlocked to close the bag thus making the device undesirably difficult to use. Further, the Niedecker device is not suited for easy reuse, the two parts being undesirably difficult to separate
The present invention is aimed at ameliorating one or more of the aforementioned problems and to providing a clamp for efficiently closing a flexible bag and which can be relatively easily reused.